Edward B. Lewis Biography

Born on May 20, 1918, in Wilkes-Barre, PA; died of prostate cancer, July
21, 2004, in Pasadena, CA. Geneticist. A youthful obsession with a simple
insect led Edward B. Lewis to become one of the key scientists who
deciphered the genetic code that forms all living beings. Lewis used the
fruit fly to show how genes control an embryo's development, and
researchers have since shown that his discovery holds true in almost every
animal, including humans. He won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work.

Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1918. His father was a
watchmaker. He began his work on fruit flies as a high school sophomore,
when he and a friend spent the school biology club's entire
treasury, $4, responding to an ad in
Science
magazine selling fruit flies at the rate of 100 for $1. Fruit flies are
easy creatures to study because they breed easily, have a simple
structure, and go from eggs to mature flies in only ten days. Lewis and
his friend would visit a school lab every day to look through newly
hatched flies with a magnifying glass, searching for mutants, the keys to
biology research. One mutant they found, called "held-out,"
is still used in genetics research.

An accomplished young flute player, Lewis went to Bucknell University for
a year on a flute scholarship. But Bucknell did not offer any genetics
courses, so he transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he earned
a bachelor's degree in 1939. Lewis then enrolled in the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, where received
a doctorate in genetics in 1942 and a master's degree in
meteorology in 1943. His career at the school was interrupted by service
in the United States Army and Army Air Corps; he was stationed in Hawaii
and Okinawa, worked as a meteorologist and oceanographer, and reached the
rank of captain. He returned to Caltech in 1946, spent a year as a fellow
at Cambridge University in Britain from 1947 to 1948, then spent the rest
of his career at Caltech.

After the war, Lewis returned to his studies of the fruit fly. One of his
supervisors, Thomas Hunt Morgan, had used fruit flies to help prove that
chromosomes carry genes, which hold hereditary characteristics, a
discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in 1933. But when Lewis began his
work, scientists did not know much more than that about how genes worked.

Lewis reached a breakthrough when he bred two mutant flies and produced
flies with four wings instead of two. That meant that a whole section of
the fly's thorax had been replaced with a duplicate of the section
next to it. Not only had a mutant gene caused the change, Lewis realized,
but the gene must have controlled the activity of other genes to produce
the second wing.

For decades, Lewis bred mutant fruit flies, until he finally identified
the genes that controlled the development of each section of the fly. He
surprised other scientists by showing that the genes' code was
simple: the genes that control early development of the fly embryo (called
homeotic genes) lined up on the chromosomes in order, just as the segments
they controlled appear on the fly. That order, which scientists call the
"colinearity principle," was later proven to be true in
humans, mice, and other vertebrates. Lewis' work on homeotic genes,
summarized in a major article in 1978, won him the 1995 Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine.

"It was as if he made evolution occur in real time," Dr.
Gerald R. Fink, a professor of genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, told the
New York Times.
"Ed Lewis worked to use genetics to show profound evolutionary
strategies. There is no more remarkable evidence of that than his fruit
fly with four wings."

In the 1950s, Lewis offered another, very different contribution to
science: he examined how the human body reacts to radiation from X-rays,
nuclear fallout, and other sources. For his research, he examined medical
records from survivors of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on
the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during World War II.
Lewis concluded that there is no risk-free dose of radiation, and that its
effects had been underestimated. He presented his findings to a
Congressional committee in 1957. The effects of low-dose radiation are
still controversial, and they were even more so in the 1950s, when the
United States was testing nuclear weapons as a major part of its military
defense. Prominent supporters of nuclear technology, such as Admiral Lewis
Strauss, then-chairman of the United States' Atomic Energy
Commission, attacked Lewis publicly for his findings. Hurt, Lewis left the
public eye and turned back to his research.

Lewis remained a biology professor at Caltech until his 1988, and stayed
active at the school as a professor emeritus after his retirement. He
provided the entertainment at the Caltech dinner in honor of his Nobel
prize in 1995, playing with a chamber music group in the lobby as guests
arrived. He was famous on campus for the costumes he wore to the
school's Halloween party; once, he came dressed as a mutant fruit
fly with two tails. Lewis' schedule at Caltech remained the same
until a few months before his death: he got to his office at 8 a.m. and
often worked until midnight, with breaks to practice the flute from 10 to
10:30, swim in the pool, and take a mid-afternoon nap.

Lewis died of prostate cancer on July 21, 2004, in Pasadena, California;
he was 86. He is survived by his wife, Pamela, an artist he met in the
Caltech laboratory, and their sons, Hugh and Keith. A third son died in
1965.

Sources

Chicago Tribune,
July 27, 2004, sec. 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times,
July 23, 2004, p. B10.

New York Times,
July 26, 2004, p. A14.

Times
(London), August 3, 2004, p. 26.

Washington Post,
July 26, 2004, p. B4.

—Erick Trickey

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